2024: Pre-Racing Season Training
I can’t believe we are less than 100 days out from the 2024 Olympic Games and I am just so excited about everything going on on the Road to Paris.
I had a great winter focusing on gym training, improving my mindset, and getting back on the water. I spent November and December in Miami working with our US Sailing Team trainers on gaining muscle mass. I also had regular sessions with my sport psychologist improving my mental skills and preparing my mind for the upcoming year.
In January, I got back to training on the water for the first time since August. Being back on the water felt incredible, and I was so excited to start this new year. My team and I spent two weeks at one of my favorite venues, La Ventana, Mexico. The main focus was just to shake off the rust and enjoy the sessions. We had plenty of really productive days, and I left Baja feeling so excited about training and improving.
After Mexico I got to spend a week in Los Angeles training at the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center with the US SailGP Team. It was so cool to get to work out in their space and find new ways to improve performance. We had physical testing, mental profiling, and team building activities designed to assess our skills and learn to optimize for our different roles. Although I am not a full time athlete in the team now, I look forward to being more involved after the Olympics.
Next I was headed to New York for a couple days to shoot with Ralph Lauren. I am very proud to be a Ralph Lauren athlete for this Olympic year, and got to be one of the first to see and try on some of the pieces from the Paris 2024 collection. It was such a cool experience and I’m so grateful to Ralph Lauren for including me as one of their athlete partners for this year.
Following a crazy busy couple of days in New York, it was time to go back to Mexico for another couple weeks of training. We got so much high quality training time on the water testing some new equipment and practicing racing with a big group. I was lucky enough that one of my former teammates, Evan Heffernan, was able to come down for 10 days to help me work on speed. We had great conditions and I walked away feeling super improved and excited to get to Europe for the start of the racing season which was coming up in just a week.
I got to go home to the San Francisco Bay Area for a week which was so nice after such a crazy couple of months flying around the country. It was my first time home since October and would be my last time home before the Olympics. It was great to spend lots of time at the St Francis Yacht Club, my home club. I even got to do a Wednesday Yachting Luncheon and reconnected with the whole StFYC community with an organized Olympic send off. I also got to be involved in some cool media productions with NBC. NBC’s Lester Holt came to film for a day, and NBC Sports came to do a Chasing Gold piece with me and my parents. Although it was busy, it was a fun week spending quality time with my parents and lots of family friends.
After that week at home, I decided to go to Los Angeles one more time before going to Europe for the rest of the summer. I wanted to have one more solid week of gym training and prioritizing my nutrition before going racing. As a development athlete on the US SailGP Team, I was able to come to the Red Bull Athlete Performance Center and have access to all the best resources available to help me get primed for racing the following week. I did some more physical testing and fatigue assessments, trained in the gym with a bunch of other Red Bull athletes with trainer supervision, recovered in the sauna, worked with the physiotherapist, and even did a cooking class with the in-house dietician. It was a great week and got me feeling ready to hop back across the pond and get into racing.